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Through a lab on “Static and Dynamic IP addresses”, I was able to identify the cause of my EC2 instance changing its public IP address every time I stopped and restarted it.
In the lab scenario, a customer reached out to an AWS Cloud Support Engineer (CSE) for help with a networking issue: their EC2 instance’s public IP kept changing whenever they started and stopped it. As the CSE, my task was to investigate and resolve the problem.
This sounded very similar to what I experienced over the weekend when I created an EC2 instance to set up an n8n instance. After completing the installation and confirming everything was working, I stopped the instance and left it. On Sunday, I restarted the server and tried to access my self-hosted n8n instance through the domain name I had attached, but it wasn’t accessible.
Confused, I checked my Portainer dashboard (I used Portainer as my server admin dashboard to deploy containers via stacks). Looking at the n8n container logs, I noticed it couldn’t ping the domain name. So I compared the EC2 instance’s public IP with the one in my Cloudflare DNS settings and realized they were different. After updating Cloudflare with the new IP and waiting a few minutes, everything worked again. I didn’t stop the server afterward because I was worried about breaking it.
It turned out that I needed to create an Elastic IP (EIP) and assign it to my instance. After finishing the lab, I went back to the AWS console, opened the EC2 dashboard, and noted my current IP address. Then I navigated to the Elastic IP section, generated a new EIP, and assigned it to my instance. After a short restart, I saw the new IP reflected. To confirm, I stopped and restarted the instance again, and this time the IP stayed the same. Problem solved! I then updated my Cloudflare DNS settings to point to the new static IP.
Interestingly, the study group I was part of also did a class presentation on Internet Protocols, covering Static, Dynamic, Public, and Private addresses—exactly the concepts I had just experienced in practice.
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